By DEXTER DUGGAN
Imagine, just wildly imagine, that Donald Trump said it wasn’t a big deal if his supporters tried to destroy the headquarters of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the New York Times building, and the New York State Democratic Party offices in his birth city of New York.
After all, let’s imagine Trump said, these properties occupy just a very few blocks in a metropolitan area of nearly 3,500 square miles.
Even Trump’s strongest backers readily would concede that if the president had made such an inexplicable assertion, he’d be having even worse than a Joe Biden-type moment of dementia.
Yet that was the type of journalistic excuse seriously put forward to brush off weeks of violent left-wing disruption in Portland. It was at the site of The Oregonian, the state’s largest newspaper.
Scoffing at media reports from outside Oregon that there’s danger “for children and families to stroll through downtown Portland,” The Oregonian headlined a story posted July 18, and updated July 20, “Feds, right-wing media paint Portland as ‘city under siege.’ A tour of town shows otherwise.”
The article said, “The images that populate national media feeds…come almost exclusively from a tiny point of the city: a 12-block area surrounding the Justice Center and federal courthouse.”
An accompanying map was captioned: “Contrary to the image of Portland as a war zone being peddled on social media and other outlets, there have been peaceful demonstrations all over the city while protesters clashing with police is generally limited to a few small areas.”
May we assume that this journalistic placidity means no ACLU offices or newspaper headquarters have been put to the torch in the place nicknamed the Rose City?
Left-wingers who attribute mental illness to Trump couldn’t do better than to say this is the crazy kind of excuse he would make for his own supporters hypothetically destroying just New York City left-wing bastions.
Except this was the defense used by left-wingers for their own brand of thugs to be tearing apart some of their own West Coast cities.
Portland, the Oregonian article added, is “a city of 650,000 people that encompasses 145 square miles.”
Well, they probably can’t burn it all down at once. Give them time, fellas. And once they destroy enough, they simply can put the rest of town under their command without having to raze every block.
Among other supposedly benign activities, they set the Portland police union building on fire. The Washington Examiner posted on July 19 that “rioters cut off access to the area by lighting dumpsters on fire in the middle of the roads. They then broke down the doors of the facility and rushed inside and started a fire.”
Further, the police department reported that “officers were targeted with projectiles and that several squad cars were vandalized during the riots. Some officers were injured, but the department did not specify how many officers were hurt or the severity of the injuries,” the Examiner said.
Incredibly, the Oregonian article brushed off the fact of the police union building fire, writing: “The agency has not been able to corroborate its claim that the union building was at serious risk. Nevertheless, images and video of the event, as well as fires lit at the base of the city’s historic downtown elk fountain, have galvanized conservative media across the country.”
These benighted conservatives might as well wonder: Why not let the self-destructive radicals have their way as they wish, with the state’s left-wing Democrat establishment already kissing their ashes-covered, sandaled feet?
For one reason, Oregon isn’t yet asking to secede from the United States, so the force of national authority has to put down riots and insurrection if local officials are too cowardly, or too ideologized. For another reason, the federal government has official property there that it has the responsibility to protect.
Although it’d be better if the federalist philosophy of individual states’ governance prevailed more often than it does these days, the point arrives when defiant local officials protecting rioters, looters, and arsonists resemble the old segregationist Democrat politicians in the South warning that federal troops better stay off their soil.
The left-wingers who would have the federal government directly dominate the nation over the COVID-19 crisis apparently believe at the same time that rioters and arsonists should do as they please in major U.S. cities, and certainly not only Portland.
In the rush of national thuggery news that’s like trying to drink from a fire hose — unless the radicals burn down the fire station, too — Seattle-based KIRO posted on July 20 that a protest there that began by calling for the abolition of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement was followed by “a secondary group of demonstrators (who) joined in and were seen carrying baseball bats.”
They marched toward Seattle police headquarters, damaging businesses along the way, KIRO said police said, then damaged the old federal courthouse, graffitied the police building and graffitied and broke windows at the municipal court.
Continuing to the West Precinct building, the thugs reportedly “confronted officers outside. Members of the group then lit mortar-type fireworks and threw them at officers from a close range, injuring 12,” before they, looting along the way, went to the East Precinct, where they “broke windows and threw ‘some type of pyrotechnic item’ into the lobby that started a small fire.”
A Propaganda Sheet
A former Seattle resident told The Wanderer, “Portland and Seattle are both lovely cities, but it’s looking more and more doubtful that they will ever recover from this. . . . When I was school age in Seattle, a friend of mine famously said: ‘Oregon is full of weirdos.’ It seems she was right.”
Again, bear in mind — as this writer has said more than once — if Trump’s MAGA-capped backers were tearing apart cities, even if they hadn’t managed to destroy thousands of square miles yet, the national left-wing establishment would be screaming for international troops to quell them.
But when left-wing politicians somehow think kindred thugs’ rioting, blazes, frozen water bottles, bats and bullets will usher in a restructured liberal nirvana, they scream in protest if the federal government dares try to restore order. Why, this is a Trump invasion or usurpation, a very denial of democracy!
A July 21 article at the conservative Federalist website by Elizabeth Vaughn said that The New York Times, by now a far-left propaganda sheet instead of newspaper, said, “Federal Agents Unleash Militarized Crackdown on Portland,” and shrieked:
“The extraordinary use of federal force in recent days, billed as an attempt to tamp down persistent unrest and protect government property, has infuriated local leaders who say the agents have stoked tensions. ‘This is an attack on our democracy,’ Mayor Ted Wheeler of Portland said.”
The Federalist article said: “The Portland rioters have damaged federal buildings including the Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt Federal Building and the Hatfield Courthouse. They have also vandalized the Gus J. Solomon Courthouse and the Pioneer Courthouse.”
The article added that law-enforcement officers were assaulted with rocks, bottles, hammers, Tasers, stun guns, fireworks, fecal matter, and lasers.
The Federalist quoted far-left House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) tweeting, in part: “Trump & his stormtroopers must be stopped.”
If left-wing Democratic politicians were so determined to have their own cities and states wrecked in order to obtain some ardently desired restructured social order, conservatives could wonder how far these zealots might go to arrange for vote fraud this November in order to try to end Trump’s tenure in the White House.
Writer Vaughn concluded by saying, “I’m pretty sure Democrats’ defense of the Portland riots will not be a winning issue for them in November.”
New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin noted on July 21, “More broadly, the defense of the mobs puts presidential nominee Joe Biden in yet another bind. The fact that he seems to be a mute bystander on the issue is a sign of his fundamental weakness.” Goodwin added, “Biden will have to separate himself from the blue-state rioters or watch his chances go up in their flames.”
That may be one reason dominant media are so reluctant to play the riots as their seriousness demands. They don’t want widespread national disorder indulged by Democrat leaders to drag down dementia bad Catholic Biden, their desperate hope to defeat Trump.
Phoenix conservative radio talk host Seth Leibsohn (KKNT, 960 AM) said on July 21 that he was “incredibly amazed” at local government behavior in Portland. Leibsohn advised that listeners look up official Department of Homeland Security (DHS) news releases instead of reading what has been put through The New York Times filter.
A July 21 DHS news release said, in part: “As they have for the past 50-plus days, on the evening of Monday, July 20, violent anarchists targeted the Hatfield Federal Courthouse and federal law-enforcement officers in Portland.
“Attacks on federal personnel and property over the previous several days have included violent attacks on federal officers with weapons as well as efforts to start fires at the Hatfield Federal Courthouse with federal law enforcement officers inside the building,” the release said, adding:
“The rioting continued through Monday, when seven individuals were arrested on suspicion of federal crimes including assaulting federal officers.”
Over the night of July 20-21, the release said, “over 1,000 people surrounded the Hatfield Federal Courthouse and began removing plywood coverings on the windows meant to protect the building and the federal officers inside, and then attempted to throw objects — some of them incendiary — through the windows at the officers.
“Rioters in the crowd were kicking the doors of the federal courthouse, vandalizing the building with spray paint and blocking adjacent intersections,” it said.
A Solemn Duty
A July 16 DHS news release quoted acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf: “The city of Portland has been under siege for 47 straight days by a violent mob while local political leaders refuse to restore order to protect their city. Each night, lawless anarchists destroy and desecrate property, including the federal courthouse, and attack the brave law-enforcement officers protecting it.”
Rather than tackling the violent-criminal problem, Wolf said, “local and state leaders are instead focusing on placing blame on law enforcement and requesting fewer officers in their community. This failed response has only emboldened the violent mob as it escalates violence day after day.
“This siege can end if state and local officials decide to take appropriate action instead of refusing to enforce the law. DHS will not abdicate its solemn duty to protect federal facilities and those within them. Again, I reiterate the department’s offer to assist local and state leaders to bring an end to the violence perpetuated by anarchists,” Wolf said.
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